First came Swiss Guards in their gay piebald uniforms,
carrying strange-looking pikes and halberds; and behind them were
churchly dignitaries, all bared of head; and last of all came a
very old and very feeble man, dressed in white, with a wide-brimmed
white hat - and he had white hair and a white face, which seemed
drawn and worn, but very gentle and kindly and beneficent.
He held his right arm aloft, with the first two fingers extended
in the gesture of the apostolic benediction. He was so far away
from us that in perspective his profile was reduced to the miniature
proportions of a head on a postage stamp; but, all the same, the
lines of it stood out clear and distinct. It was his Holiness,
Pope Pius the Tenth, blessing a pilgrimage.
All the guides in Rome follow a regular routine with the tourist.
First, of course, they steer you into certain shops in the hope
that you will buy something and thereby enable them to earn
commissions. Then, in turn, they carry you to an art gallery, to
a church, and to a palace, with stops at other shops interspersed
between; and invariably they wind up in the vicinity of some of
the ruins. Ruins is a Roman guide's middle name; ruins are his
one best bet. In Rome I saw ruins until I was one myself.
We devoted practically an entire day to ruins. That was the day
we drove out the Appian Way, glorious in legend and tale, but not
quite so all-fired glorious when you are reeling over its rough
and rutted pavement in an elderly and indisposed open carriage,
behind a pair of half-broken Roman-nosed horses which insist on
walking on their hind legs whenever they tire of going on four.
The Appian Way, as at present constituted, is a considerable
disappointment. For long stretches it runs between high stone
walls, broken at intervals by gate-ways, where votive lamps burn
before small shrines, and by the tombs of such illustrious dead
as Seneca and the Horatii and the Curiatii. At more frequent
intervals are small wine groggeries. Being built mainly of Italian
marble, which is the most enduring and the most unyielding substance
to be found in all Italy - except a linen collar that has been
starched in an Italian laundry - the tombs are in a pretty fair
state of preservation; but the inns, without exception, stand most
desperately in need of immediate repairing.
A cow in Italy is known by the company she keeps; she rambles
about, in and out of the open parlor of the wayside inn, mingling
freely with the patrons and the members of the proprietor's household.
Along the Appian Way a cow never seems to care whom she runs with;
and the same is true of the domestic fowls and the family donkey.
A donkey will spend his day in the doorway of a wine shop when he
might just as well be enjoying the more sanitary and less crowded
surroundings of a stable.
